I've spent some time, these past few days, looking over my recent writings, here and elsewhere. And what I see, besides a raging torrent of anger/grief/despair, is that my underlying circumstances have not improved during that time. And yet, I am finding a new distance from that outpouring of unbearable emotion. The situation has not changed, but (miraculously, mercifully) my relationship with all that has been (and continues to be) unacceptable has shifted.
And the situation has not changed. In some ways it is worsened. My teeth again need repair, as if scraping together the barest wherewithal for the last dental repairs had never happened. With that comes pain and discomfort. My health, despite my earnest, focussed efforts, remains precarious. My injuries linger, untreated. My finances are in ruins, and following on from that is an eternity of days in which I cannot go and I cannot do that which I need and want to be doing. More than the lack of necessities, this comprises a kind of theft of days of my life, and an eternity of opportunities that I relinquish, week by week, as the days, months and years of my life tick past, undone.
There is a fuller realisation, too, of how these more recent circumstances sit nested within a longer span of similar, but less acutely confronting circumstances. It is as if someone has looked over my life, and identified all those things that were problematic, and amplified them in very deliberate ways. Turned up the dial on things that I managed and overcame, with varying effort, for years beforehand. And looking now at those circumstances, I wonder how it is that I remained so buoyant, so resilient against the constant grind. We have had so little, for so long, and oftentimes what we've had has been whittled away in patterns that are not evident in the lives of those around me. Strangely enough, even in the face of all that, I always believed I was surrounded by abundance, when the reality is we had so little, and often not enough, and yet I made a kind of art out of doing without. I adopted a kind of boho earth mama sensibility to smooth the rough edges from having to rely on second-hand, cheap, homemade things, because we simply did not have the money to buy what we needed. That works, for a while, when you are young, and have your health, and you can spend your time filling the gaps left by not-having enough. But I am no longer young, and my health is less assured now, and I have not the energy left now to transform the shoddy cast-offs of other people's lives into something I can pretend is nice.
More recently, I had to turn to charity for food. This is deeply embarrassing to me, and it was shocking to my family when they found out. Because the assumption is that we are doing OK, and if we're not doing OK, then there's a universe of people we can turn to for help before we need to seek the impersonal assistance of strangers. But it never occurred to me to ask my family for money for this most basic of things, food. Because, for years, we've scratched by with the most meagre of supplies, and I never asked for money then, either. We've shopped with a calculator and gone without many, many times before. But what's different now is I cannot eat the very cheapest food anymore without endangering my health. I can't cook a packet of pasta or rice or beans and dress it up with condiments and the last of the vegetables and eat that and then stir an egg into the leftovers and cut it into pieces and fry it and serve it again like it's a new meal anymore, because what's at stake is my eyesight, my kidneys, my fingers and toes. So when the fresh food has run out, and so has the money, and I need to buy medication, and the car needs petrol because I'm required to be places, then food comes after everything else. Because no-one's going to pay for medicine or petrol, and the debt collectors will still take hundreds of dollars every fortnight even though you've stated quite assertively that you cannot afford it, but you can turn up, brittle with embarrassment and need, and people will give you food, at least a small amount, enough to stretch whatever you have left, at least for a while.
Perhaps this provides some insight about the incandescence of my rage at all the other circumstances that have unfolded, usually in contravention of well-founded, reasonable expectations. The cunning subterfuge of my mother's domestic partner, in concealing her death to spirit all her possessions away before we were even given the space to grieve her loss. The affront of institutional non-response which prevented me from seeking therapeutic care for my substantial injuries following my fall. The trenchant refusal of multiple organisations to grant me job interviews, even when my resume is dripping with a vast body of highly relevant experience. And a plethora of denials, refusals and withholdings of other types of access and support that have been hinted, offered and even overtly promised to me by many people, as I have traversed the half-dreamed other-life that provides the only explanation for the bizarre manner my life has careened off the rails of normal cause-and-effect into this other non-sensical, repeating farce. There is a shape and form to this other-life, and it is peopled by those who have, smilingly, proffered loyalty before slinking off to attend to their own interests with nary a second glance in my direction. That I am absorbing all this loss is immense, that I am absorbing it all without even the most basic material sustenance is unfathomable. And yet it continues.
My younger self would stand fast in her steady belief of existing in an abundant universe. But this circumstance is not abundant. Not because the universe has changed, but because the underlying abundance has been systematically stripped away before it can reach me. But I am open, Always it seems, to generosity and foolish hope. And I do not wish to suggest here that I have been a wholly passive victim of what has transpired. I have rallied, many times over, tried and re-tried despite the cautious urging of my intuition, which has, it seems, the measure of my reality even better than my clever, rational self. Nothing is what it seems here, and hasn't been for a long time, and yet I am not ready to cede defeat. Even when I have been swamped by my own rage, anguish and despair, I have not laid down arms. And in a non-sensical realm any response is appropriate, and I am aware that I have enjoyed some successes, even when the whole of my trajectory has appeared to be one of impossible dead-ends. But the end result is I do not have the money I need to be living the life I should reasonably expect at this time, and that blunt instrument slugs me on a regular basis in real ways.
My mother was extraordinarily preoccupied by a narrative of monetary denial, and it pains me that my recent life has been tarnished with a similar-seeming obsession. But obsessed, I am not. I am merely confronted as anyone would be, in the same circumstances. And it belies the reality that I am an extraordinary person, that I have contributed value to the world well beyond the scope of my ordinary-seeming life, and that I will be remembered for a legacy that few can yet know or guess at. But for all that, I cannot pay to fill the tooth that now gapes, jagged and half-vacant in my jaw. I do not have the means to travel to see my family and friends, while all the big and small occasions of their life pass without me. Is this worth it? Is any of what I have undergone worth what I have lost in the process? This is not something I can answer, even now, because too many parts of the broader whole are hidden from my view. There are too many ambiguities, unmet potentialities, and even future disappointments for me to be able to cast my opinion one way or the other. What I do know, though, is that I cannot seal myself away from the inevitable tides of this existence. I am in it, even when I think myself to be entirely self-directed in my actions. It is what it is, and it has not finished with me yet.
Anger, then, cannot linger here forever. It burns too quickly and consumes too much. Perhaps the idiotic longevity of this situation has deprived my rage of the oxygen that first caused it to flare. Because this is true: this has gone on for too long, well beyond any sensible reckoning, well outside the parameters of even the most rigorous planning or forecasting. It has stubbornly persisted well beyond even my capacity to survive it, and so I have not, and I have not survived it for so long and so absolutely and even that has caused no cessation and no improvement so the only option left to me is a kind of paradoxical calm. Or maybe I'm just having a good week. Maybe the relief of having been able to buy a few groceries again flicked the PAUSE switch on my still-seething psyche. Maybe I am so burnt out now that my standards have been reset impossibly low, so that even the sun shining for an hour or the prospect of a single job interview is enough to restore me to a giddy sense of wellbeing. What nourishment is this? Whatever it is, it is a welcome reprieve, even though it comes from within and not from any obvious improvement in my fortunes.
